How to Recognize the Finish Line

A story a dancer once told me: It’s opening night. Six dancers wait in the wings, nerves taut. Their entrance is imminent—the overture has begun and they are counting the music—when the choreographer, heeding an infamous penchant for change, rushes over to them aflame with last-minute inspiration. The dancers do the only self-preserving thing they can do—stick their fingers in their ears and ignore him.

You’d think writing is more set—after a certain point, you are limited to the little black marks on the printed page, right? Ha—that’s what the “delete” key is for! And I’ve seen more than one author pause a public reading to decipher last-minute changes scribbled in the margins.

Truth is, we could tinker forever. But all artists—painters, poets, and novelists alike—eventually have to trust that it’s time to let a project go.

Deadlines and other useful delimiters

This post was pulled from a larger collection of wisdom than I could use, but I was limited by: 1) how much I could cram into a reasonable word limit, and 2) my deadline. But is reaching imposed limits reason enough to consider a piece “finished”?

In some cases, preset parameters can both inform a project’s conception and provide a sense of its completion, says writer and painter Joe Skrapits (Allentown, PA). This is particularly true in one of his specialties, plein-air landscape painting.

“The light is at a certain angle, or of a certain quality, or the shadows are in a certain place, and so you give yourself an hour or two to state what that is,” says Joe. “When the light changes, you don’t keep changing. It puts a limit on your participation of that day, anyway. And sometimes that’s good.”

A novel can’t be written in a few hours, but Skrapits offers a useful metaphor. Creating limits around your work is one way to practice walking away from it. A baby’s nap can give you an hour or two to free write. A contest provides a deadline. NaNoWriMo sets a one-month, 50K word-count goal. Creating limits will bring your finish line into clearer focus.

Perfecting vs. finishing

So how can you be sure you’ve come up with the perfect combination of the 90,000 words in your manuscript?

Of course, you can’t.

You will use the word “finished” many times in the life of your novel (you’ll finish… each draft. Developmental edits. Beta reader edits. Concision edits. Agent edits. Publisher edits. Copy edits.) But beyond the mechanics of writing “The End,” from whence comes your sense of completion?

“A piece is finished when it satisfies the artist’s intention,” Skrapits says, adding that his definition presupposes that the artist has a fairly clear vision of what he or she wants to achieve.

That leads us into the first of many ways to define “finished.”

Philosophical: What were you trying to say, and have you said it? Such a simple question and yet we can forget to ask it. Writing a new synopsis after each draft will help determine if your accumulation of words has indeed fulfilled your intention.

Editorial: Is it as tight as it can possibly be? Readers won’t want to wade through excess verbiage to find your story and publishers won’t want to cut down one more tree than necessary to print your book. Make every word count.

Critical: Ask your beta readers what they perceive the story question to be, and if, in their opinion, you addressed it. Ask about character arc, relevant obstacles, pace. While caught up in your novel’s minutiae, you may have trouble seeing the big picture.

Promotional: “This is a great book. It starts slow but hang in there because it has a great finish.” We hear recommendations like this all the time. What we don’t hear: “This book is amazing! It starts with a bang but then fizzles out.” Make your ending strong enough to generate word-of-mouth sales. If that necessitates going back to the beginning to deepen your character’s desire or raise the stakes, and you have the heart to do so, it will be worth it.

Finished—or abandoned?

While “finishing” is debatable, “stopping” is often a practical decision. Maybe your perseverance is used up, or your emotional connection to the work has snapped. A new project insistently calls your name. And there wouldn’t be such a thing as a “drawer novel” if most of us hadn’t experienced the need to walk away because we’d reached a dead end.

“There are times when I complete a draft and feel oddly sated and at ease with the work,” said poet Ann E. Michael (Emmaus, PA). “This can be a good sign. It can also be an indicator of self-delusion. I have heard poets speak of the ‘click’ at the close of a poem, like a perfectly fitting lid. That’s nice to achieve, but it doesn’t mean the poem is done. It just means the ending’s okay. There may still be work to do.”

Letting go

Remember that a novel is a snapshot in time. The concern that led you into the story was indicative of where you were in your life. Hopefully, you will grow as a person and your concerns will change. If you start adding these new concerns into your old novel, it’s probably time to stop.

Most likely, the only creative piece requiring a lifetime of effort is you. When it comes to your writing, if you are finished exploring one idea, move on, or you’ll be rewriting the same piece your whole life long. Keep submitting it for critique and others will gladly reinforce your uncertainty by continuing to find things for you to change.

Skrapits used the notion of a visual arts retrospective to explain why the notion of “finished” shouldn’t cause an artist undue stress. Writers can do the same by imagining all of their novels on a shelf—even those that were abandoned or failed to sell. “You see the whole arc and how everything relates,” Joe says. “You can tap into the dialogue going on among the work. ‘Finished’ matters less, and you just consider where it fits.”

Would you call intuiting when to walk away a “mad skill”? Have you struggled with finding the finish line in your own work? Share: how do you know when you are finished?

Wish you could buy this author a cup of joe?

Kathryn Craft is the author of two novels from Sourcebooks, The Art of Falling and The Far End of Happy. Her work as a freelance developmental editor at Writing-Partner.com follows a nineteen-year career as a dance critic. Long a leader in the southeastern Pennsylvania writing scene, she leads writing workshops and retreats, and is a member of the Tall Poppy Writers. Learn more on Kathryn's website.

Comments

Kathryn, ! Yes, I would call knowing when to finish a Mad Skill. As both a painter and a writer, I’ve experienced that initial flash of inspiration turning to mud. Of shifting shadows and the impulse to shift with them. As you stated, above, there are may ways to make that mud. Right now, I’m completing a revision with my editor’s notes. When I told my husband that I would then go back in for more cutting and shaping, he asked me (not for the first time), if I was ever going to be done. And finally, with this revision, I see a finish line. I even feel it in my body. Very weird. But it’s a physical ‘letting go’. I’m printing this post. It’s a treasure.

I love the body intuition angle, Susan, and glad you could appreciate the multi-media approach here on a personal level. There were any times, during my debut’s 8-year journey, when even other writers wondered if I wasn’t just shifting words around and then shifting them back again. But I knew I was learning how to improve the story I wanted to tell—I could feel the improvement in my bones. It’s exciting, right?

My experience this week with finishing may be relevant even though the piece was a poem, not a novel. A fellow poet and I challenged each other to write a poem about another person’s lovely unusual name and the setting from which it grew. I am not entirely satisfied with my poem, which I would never submit for publication, but it is adequate for the purpose and, I believe, will be liked by the owner of the name.

The takeaway? Purpose. That poem is for a small private audience. I can let the poem go, even though it could be much better, and use my time and focused efforts on the WIP for eventual publication: another purpose entirely.

I thought I was uniquely odd until someone who requested a Scrivener template from my blog told me his intentions as a ‘writer,’ which didn’t involve the writing – he would plan things like James Patterson, and pay someone else to produce the words – which seemed even further out there. I told him to go for it – not up to me to discourage any styles of producing books.

For me, it’s all about the finished product: if that works for the reader, who cares how the sausage was made?

You’re right, Alicia, I can’t imagine working this way! You must be very clear about the entirety of your story before you start writing, then? But wow—to end up exactly where you wanted to go, without one wasted word or meandering thought, each layer already included and sure that every word is contributing to the overall arc—what a gift!

I would imagine that you are dealing with some of these questions on the scene level, then, instead of with the story as a whole—particularly, “Have I accomplished what I set out to do?”